The destroyer in your foyer

Microsoft cooked up a cheap imitation of a true multitouch interface. pft.
I’d rather get Corkboard. When there’s actual software to run 3dmax or photoshop or similar on it.

On another note, the cybernetic revolution is far, far away. I think that, in contrast to cyberpunk future visions, well not see people chopping off their own limbs for the stylistic choice of getting a prosthetic one, but rather detachable enhancements and body accessories instead of body replacements. I do mean in the functional direction, of course. Body piercing and self-maiming is cosmetic at best and disabling at its worst.

As an example of the 2000-era cyberwear, check out the keyboard pants. Guess where the joystick is?
New forms of synthesized music can appear with the integration of circuitry and speakers in clothing,
like in the air guitar shirt or the Pacer suit. The Pacer suit looks cool as well, maybe more like an MC suit than a dancer suit.
Some functions are better integrated in a jacket, I suppose, but there are functions I’d love to see integrated in clothes. Like a geiger counter, the composition of particles in the air, or a wifi detection unit. Not in a shirt, though. I wash my clothes.

 MMORPG: Massive Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game            MOG: Multiplayer Online Game

When it comes to characters in a roleplaying game, I don’t like classes. I can see why they’ve been used, certainly, but there are better ways to ensure that players easily get to build the character they like. In a skill-based rather than class-based system you can specialize into the already known roles of healer, tank and DPS specialists. Choosing which can come at a later point, and you might make a character more suitable to your tastes.  The click-and-wait autocombat system of the older MMORPG models are a relic of a time with lousier bandwith.

What defines the roleplaying genre isn’t attributes, big numbers telling you just how strong, just how smart or just how fast  your character is. It’s the role you play, your influence through your character upon the story told, upon the game played.  -The choices you make through your character. Roleplaying isn’t about numbers, it’s about taking an individual role in an interactive story. How you take control of that character ought to be as immersive as it is possible to make it.

Some players like to manage numbers, but truly, the numbers aren’t as relevant as the choices you make, who you ally with, what quests you want to do. The numbers are abstract. If your skillset is purely defined by what you can do, as in special actions, appearance changing aspects or special attacks, you’ve got a set of  much more defining  traits than abstract numbers. In a game with lots of attributes it may be easy to get sidetracked and lose touch with the character. Micromanagement is better for simulations of civilisations or cities or warring kingdoms, as is autocombat in real time.

First of all, you don’t need attributes, but some sort of traits must define what your character can or cannot do. These can be specific skills, some can even be tiered. In order to pick up skills you might need a tutor to give you tasks (I’m all for minigames in a roleplaying MOG) and teach you the new skill. In any case, picking the skill ought to come before gaining experience in it, and those should be gained through tasks related to the particular skill.  Skill trees are a tried form of guided character advancement, and could work well within this environment. These ought to start out simple, and then branch out in a steadily greater amount of branches, offering deep specialisation and a broad range of choices to make. Some Skill choices can be improvements to already available actions or effects. It is important that the basic gameplay isn’t compromised, and that it is possible to do complex things with simple commands.

If you’ve really grown into the class syste; For those players who need guidance, you can let them pick a template “class” instead of choosing individual skills at the beginning. Or you can let everyone start without knowing any skills, let them meet tutors of different kinds in the start areas of the game, who teach them the basics and let the players take skills “for free” Or give the players a certain amount of skill picks, let them start the game without picking first, then allow them to pick their starting skills as they learn to know the game. The player should always be guided through the start of the game, but without being restrained from playing the game.

On another note, the focus of a RPG MOG shouldn’t be only on the character, but the story in which the character is  involved. Therefore I propose that a changeable, yet persistent world is the ideal environment for a rpg MOG.
And I am looking forward to the day one appears.

A multitouch screen can be produced at the price of a regular screen. The required space takes us back to the desk-eating size screens of old, but hey, some sacrifices must be made, right? And you can toss that keyboard and mouse, or at least hide them under the desk in a secret compartment guarded by poison snakes. At least, that’s what the people at Eyebeam provide.

I’ve been playing a variety of free multiplayer online games for a while now, mostly to check them out and leave them, but some are rather interesting and fun.

I tired of what I call click-and-wait combat years ago, after being an avid fan of computer rpgs. I still like crpgs, but the autocombat is so detrimental to my enjoyment of the games that I have no tolerance for it nowadays. Autocombat is fine for wargames where you control several people at once. That’s fine. I can enjoy that. But in a roleplaying game, where I can play this one person, companions or not, I want to be in control of that person, and not sit there and watch Lady Luck decide whether I smash that goblin’s face in or not. Look at Oblivion. Well done. If my sword hits my opponent, I do damage based on my skill with this weapon, and the quality of it. Okay. If I avoid the goblin’s blow, I am unharmed.
Both actions and reactions are a result of my actions as a player, and I see immediate response in my character. Why is the computer rpg caught in the sticky web of autocombat when you control a single character? Forget the mouse, there’s a keyboard I can use. I’d still be playing neverwinter nights if I could control it in the same way as, say, God of war, or gauntlet, or other action game in a third person view. I would still have the same verbs available, but it’d be more fun.

Anyhoo. I’ve found Lunia to be the best example of what I want Crpgs to be. You get to pick new attacks as you level up, and there are several levels of each new power. It’s good. Imagine in NWN, that you instead of stances have powers, like Trip, Sneak attack or Fireball, how much more fun wouldn’t that be? And in multiplayer, no less. Autocombat fails to entertain me to such a level that I cannot enjoy the stories in games with such a mechanism.

I hear the Witcher might be for my taste, but I haven’t checked it out yet. I shall.

Read this article by David Marsh. It’s on staying independent, and if you can, you have achieved the blessing of, well, independence. Being reliant on a publisher or a license holder can become a company killer situtation. Sure, I read about that in another Gamasutra article a few weeks ago, but I’m seeing it happen as well.

The most important question is posed at the start of the article:
“What resources do I need to accomplish my goal, and do I have them?”
Working for free only works if you can avoid starvation and bankrupcy, which is not an option for me.
You can get another day job, but that doesn’t make a company or a big game.
Or you can get investors, which is hard enough in itself, at least today, because of the magical stock market plummeting.

Is it a goal in itself to make a big game? No, not really. If you’re going to survive on making games you need to do one of three things:
1: Make a steady stream of small games at small prices. The revenue from your first games will increase as the sheer amount of games and word of mouth calls attention to your work.
2: Make a huge, costly game that utilises the latest of shaders and physics engines, in a world that reflects upon current trend. The income from the game is expected to be from the sales within the first year after launch. a big wad of monies that will hopefully cover the exorbitant costs of making the game and the costs for the next project. If this is your first game, it had better have some innovative gimmick that makes it appear to be more than what you’d initially think.
3: Make an interesting game with open-ended gameplay and make profits on small additions to the game, either through expansions, microtransactions, a monthly fee, or acess passes to special areas.

Now, it may not be a surprise to you that I don’t believe in making a big, complicated game as your first project.
The amount of people to finish it within a reasonable time (read: decade) and the costs that come with content creation is too great unless you’ve got renowned veterans who can pull investors. Big ones.
It is no secret that content creation is a big expense in game development today. And if you’re going to write your own game engine on top of that, You’ve at least doubled your costs. At least if you’re developing for the PC. No consistency in hardware/software compatibility. That and piracy is making consoles a lot more attractive to develop for.
Sure, there are xbox and ps, DS and wii pirates, but they’ve got to work harder. It’s not as easy, fortunately.

What you need to start out with is a smaller project, as in less costly, and doesn’t need so many sales to cover the cost. Thus you have some money to go on to another, maybe bigger project. Digital distribution is the future, baby, and it’s about time it happened. Make it convenient and easy to distribute your game at a reasonable price. That’s one thing that fights piracy.

Once, I believe, art meant an object made with great skill. An art, therefore, would be the perfection of that skill.
Nowadays it seems the moneylenders and media moguls define what is art and not. Is a stuffed family dog carrying its own ashes in a pouch art? Is a blue paint stain 32 millimeters in diameter randomly placed on a yellowish white canvas surface art? Is a piece of shit taken out of its context (like a toilet bowl or moss-ridden lawn) art?

I couldn’t care less whether it is art or not. What I do care about is the bloody hype based on a name. Why pay 5 million for something just as pretty (as interpreted by the viewer) or interesting as a piece that is nearly identical but costs 5000? I am not very involved in the art discussion, but I have an opinion, and I am getting closer to this mindset:
Ignore the whole art debate. View pieces individually based on the skill involved in making them as well as if the motive is appealing. The norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, who has sold paintings for a few mill himself, doesn’t regard his own works as art. They’re kitsch, in the regard that they’re a result of his skill at the craft of painting natural motives. How natural a woman shitting on herself in a swamp is can be discussed, but the craftsman has tried to represent nature in three dimensions on a flat surface through his skill.

Whether or not that is art is irrelevant to me. I wouldn’t buy it, but I can respect the craftmanship and recognise a few of the techniques used, decipher how the craftsman has achieved his lighting effects or particular tones of colour.

The art world today is just an extended arm of the culture of interior decoration. A pretentious arm infected with gangrene and ought to be chopped off. Not that nothing useful is produced, but the sheer amount of divergent art critics and self-indulgent snobbery shouldn’t go on. Hey, if the world explodes today, I don’t need any art critics in MY bunker. :p

Performing arts, on the other hand, are still rated by the skill of the ones, well, performing the art. Couldn’t painted art and sculpture be rated likewise? Huh? Huh? What? Huh? Yeah.

Now, France is about to accept video games as an art form, apparently. We’ll see how that goes. It’d be collaborative art, I suppose. Is a programmer an artist? Or is it the project leader? Or the game artist? The graphic designer?

Pft. Art.

Anyways. I know of a little girl who paints rather pretty pictures. Is she an artist? Check this out. [^]

Ah. The dimensions of space. What sweet music they make.
Most top games are made in 3D, and it seems to be expected of game developers to make games in three dimensions.
Sure, as long as it is beneficial to the game, go ahead. Sometimes, though, it just isn’t necessary, and technical issues may inhibit the freedom of the artist. And other times, 2d is just damned good enough. Like in Iron Dukes, per example. I found it fun, and understand well why it is nominated for best web browser game this year by the Independent Games Festival.

Mmm, I say. Another example of 2d exellence is Patapon, Oboro Muramasa and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

mmh.

Multitouch and device-free interface is coming on strong. Yum. Look at this, from a somebody at the Univerity of Tromsø, Norway. I must say this looks rather promising. The downside to it is the amount of cameras and projectors used for it, which makes it rather expensive, but see it as a macro version of what could come. You only need one projector for Jeff Han’s multitouch device, or the media wall, as seen on CBS Sunday Morning.

The use of sound is a great contribution to the future possibilities of human-computer interface. If you can’t snap your fingers you can use one of those clickers they use for dogs. Or crisp bread.

I’ve mentioned that I use photoshop, and here’s someone who might be granting me a wish in a not too distant future, I hope. This was made in Germany, I suppose.

I had an idea for a game once, a racing game, where you’d accelerate by making noise into a microphone. So “Vroooom, Vroooom, vrooooooooooom” would give you momentum. Imagine playing it alone. “Jim? Jim? What ARE you doing in there?”

I’ve been considering a more plausible game idea as well:
I’d like a free roaming platformer with shooting, equips, vehicles and destructible buildings, if not terrain, an engaging storyline with no cutscenes, intelligent routines for the crowd AI and bosses, and good reasons for going to where bosses and major plot points are. I am thinking maybe three to five levels, but of a large size, the first being a planet, the second a moon, and a third a fleet of spaceships, possibly both within and without, depending on the situation. I haven’t gotten that far into the plot yet.
But you see what I am getting at, no? I want to make it toony, but not too cute. And there’d be violence, but with great mobility and speed. I really liked the Zone of the Enders games, though I only played them a little. The speed and power you feel in those games, coupled with the danger you are in if you go wrong makes for an adrenaline-inducing experience. I’d like to make combat situations like that.

Now, this is brilliant, and much in line with my own view.

Oh, a game concept:

The Drop:
Be the first to get to the bottom of a deep, deep dungeon pit. Each level is a hole with several unstable and holeridden floors on the way down to the bottom. You should, in most levels, be able to fall all the way down. Basically a falling game and a fighter, you may hit obstacles like wooden structures that break apart, spiderwebs you can get stuck in, iron gates that need to be opened before you fall deeper. When stuck in spiderwebs you must break free, maybe kill the spider and cut the web apart before you fall on. Powerups: torches to throw before you to burn away webs or set fire to wood or oil. They’re stuck to walls so you must manuever close to them to get them. Bombs: Throw them in front of you (below) to blow away wooden structures and stone pillars or other large solids. Sandbags: increase your speed down, but burst apart after a short while. Bigger weapons: Increase falling speed and weapon damage. Monsters hang around on structures of stone and steel to get you if you stop, or get you as you pass by. The winner is the first to get to the bottom, but if you get knocked unconscious you could still win, provided that you don’t hit anything. Now, this could be untrue if there was an endboss, and you’d have to be conscious to harm it. Let’s say there’s an endboss in the bottom of the pit, and you have to be able to attack to finish him. As you fall, you accumulate a damage potential, so the longer you fall before hitting an enemy or obstacle, the more damage you deal in that first strike. With an endboss you’d have a single player aspect at once, not to be the first to reach the bottom, as you could be the only actual player there, but instead that you’d have to defeat the endboss to win. And falling all the way through to one-shot the boss - Yeah! That’d be cool. The bosses could also throw you up in the air, and thus give you a chance to hit bacl with a falling hit, but they should’nt throw you up so high you can one-shot it after you’ve actually reached the bottom. Imagine the team combo there, when player 1, 2 and 3 hit it just after each other and “boom!” the endboss is done. Victory dance! Highscore! Best speed, longest drop, most damage, most collateral damage. I’d want to make that.

The size of laptops and the power of touch.
A few laptops are getting twofinger touchpads, or have got them already. This is used as seen in videos of multitouch surfaces like the Microsoft table and Jeff Han’s lowcost table. Johnny Chung Lee also has a lot of bright ideas about the next generation of computer interfaces. Basically, what you get as a private consumer now is the two-finger rotate, move and resize maneuvers in addition to ye olde one-touch tablet. This is ancient technology. We could have had multitouch surfaces twenty years ago. The main hindrance is supposedly materials and a whole lot of attitude. Or lack of attitude.

I’ve been thinking about these surfaces and gaming. In most programs the multitouch surface doesn’t need any peripherals, but if you’re going to play a traditional fps game I see a few problems. The simplest solution is to have a default keyboard movement configuration, or something like Nintendo’s D-pad or WASD. The keyboard would of course be onscreen, not a peripheral. Duh. You could tap anywhere you’d like to shoot, draw a line to slash someone or spray bullets over a bigger area.

Now, with peripherals, what’d be better than a gamepad or keyboard? The Wiimote and the Nunchuk.
-Or a variation on that wonderful scheme. I’d like to reshape the ‘mote to fit the hand better, and possibly put IR in both hands. Mmm. That’d give more options for gestures. Johnny Chung Lee suggests gloves, which may be an option.

Now, I have no patience for the Mac, having used it for three years at school about ten years ago. Sure, it may have improved since then, but now I know windows pcs more (help me!) and I wouldn’t want to switch to a more expensive brand of computer for its exterior design. The truth is that if I buy a windows pc I get more bang for my bucks.
But.

If Apple or some other evil corporation makes me a multitouch computer, with no peripherals necessary and the ability to use photoshop or 3ds max or maya with no other problems than what’s there today, I’m gonna buy it. Oh, it’d have to be priced for the average consumer. I haven’t won the lottery yet.

This is the way to go. Laugh at Minority Report. Go ahead. But their way of manipulating the screen isn’t far off from a good interface. I believe a multitouch interface is much better than a completely gesture manipulated interface, though.

Fun.

Fun is essential to a game. Otherwise it becomes a tedious set of actions designed to kill time without actually producing anything. Games, if successful, produce fun and hopefully relieve the participants of stress. This reqiures a certain level of envolvement. Fun doesn’t have to be humorous, like a comedy. For instance, I think it is fun to watch science documentaries. Or read about religion. Both are deeply serious things that can be a source fun in many ways.

Tetris is a puzzle game. Many think it is a fun game, and it is a fairly casual game. I’ve played a 3d version of it, called Blockout, which I thought was even better. Some people like to do puzzles for fun. I can relate to the quiet contemplation of where does blue bit number 1235 fit in, but it becomes less interesting when I already know what the end result is going to look like, and that I can’t do much with it except either leave it be or take it apart again. If I was building a rocket engine in the same way I’d be more interested.

Many massive multiplayer online games today have some sort of construction element in them. The usual approach to the gameplay for this is to have the player go explore the world to find ingredients for specific items. When these are collected, you can fuse them together to make the wanted item. Sometimes you have to spend an amount of gold to get a craftsman to make it, even. Or you might lose gold from your inventory for trying to make the item for some unexplained reason. In short, there are many unexciting ways to craft items games. I want to bother players a bit more.

If you had 10 kilos of iron and 10 cubic meters of wood you could make a lot of different things. You could make a sword or three, maybe twenty spears, or ten pickaxes. What would determine the quality of the product? I believe the purity of the ore and the skill of the maker would be the most important. Now where does this relate to gameplay?

Imagine that when you had collected your ingredients, which would be refined iron ore and wood or coal for heating it, you go to a proper workplace, like a smithy, and start a crafting minigame. You’ve decided to make a sword after a pattern you have aquired after an old master, so the crafting screen shows a blocky 3d outline of a sword, floating above glowing embers. Kinda like this: =I===> only in 3d. Down in the embers there are a bunch of scattered pieces of iron. They all have a shape corresponding to a specific part of the item to be crafted. You can pick them up and rotate them and put them inside the item shape. Pieces will snap together if they fit. You can select more than one item once they’ve been placed inside the shape. How advanced the item is ( per example represented in superior combat bonuses or in its appearance,) determines how many pieces there are to put together. If your character is a skilled smith there might be about twelve pieces, but if they were unskilled, there might be sixty. This would represent the time it would take based on your skill. In real life there are some actions that cannot take less time no matter how skilled you are, but in a game it doesn’t matter as much.

In other minigames you could get a time limit to perform an action, and a high character skill would get the player more time to finish the minigame. I would like to promote a character advancement system that involves skills, not levels as determining what a character can and cannot do. These skills would be improved by use, so if you hit people with a stick you get good at hitting people with a stick, not magic or cooking.